Virtual Bridges is has announced that Win4BSD for Desktops will be offered at no charge for non-commercial use.

Win4BSD is a PC emulator that runs Windows as a guest at nearly native speed under FreeBSD/PC-BSD. It is based on QEMU. However, Win4BSD offers many advantages, including improved speed, ease of use, more seamless integration with the host OS, and “grabless” mouse transition between the host and Windows
guest.

Win4BSD was built by Virtual Bridges to detirmine the level of acceptance by the FreeBSD and PC-BSD community for high-grade commercial software. After two years, we have concluded desktop BSD-oriented applications are best accepted by the non-commercial community when offered at no charge and made freely available.

This document makes a case for using a BSD style license for software and data; specifically it recommends using a BSD style license in place of the GPL. It can also be read as a BSD versus GPL Open Source License introduction and summary.

Please don’t start a flame war on BSD and GPL; I know all the pros and cons; I’m only providing links to articles, so if you don’t agree with the views held, please leave comments on the website I’ve linked to

The New York City BSD Conference begins in a few weeks (October 11-12, 2008 at Columbia University in New York City), so make sure you register as soon as possible. NYCBSDCon brings together the best and brightest of the BSD communities from the New York area and beyond.

The conference costs $95, including breakfast and lunch on both days, in addition to a number of other extras. Full-time students and Columbia University affiliates pay only $50 with valid identification.

This year’s schedule is impressive: from file systems and the portable C compiler to system and network management, we are thrilled to be able to provide such strong content. A full array of BSD developers and systems administrators are speaking, including Pawel Dawidek, Michael Lucas, Jason Wright and DragonFly BSD’s Matt Dillon. And Jason Dixon looks again to top his 2006 presentation on “Is BSD Dying?” with a look at “BSD versus the GPL.”

While the conference officially begins on Saturday morning, October 11th, attendees will be gathering on Friday night at Havanna Central, just across from Columbia University.

Linux/BSD: sharing experiences is a blog with useful howtos for FreeBSD and Linux. The latest howto is on setting up MLDonkey on an old, headless, PC.

MLDonkey is an open source, free software multi-network peer-to-peer application. Currently the following protocols are supported: eDonkey, Overnet, Bittorrent, Gnutella, Gnutella2, Fasttrack, FileTP and Kademlia.

I wanted to put my 266 Mhz Celeron to good use so I’ve decided to install MLDonkey without X11 support leaving only the core with both telnet and web interfaces.

The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2008. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 21 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program.

The FreeBSD project has released an update on the (finished/continuing) work of the projects:

Over the past month we have made some major progress on the BSD port of Bordeaux. Bordeaux for FreeBSD now has a .sh installer, the same one that we use on Linux, so you will need to have py-gtk installed for the installer to work properly.

We also have a newly built .pbi for PC-BSD 7, a big thanks goes out to the folks at PC-BSD for doing the packaging for us. If you use PC-BSD you will need to install Wine 1.1.4 from their PBI directory in order for Bordeaux to work, prior versions of Wine in the directory don’t have support for wineprefixcreate.

Some of the major changes in this build are activex, flash and java are automatically installed for you when IE 6 is installed. Now IE 6 should open most pages that require activex support. We have the back end of the new cellar-manager mostly done now, to see what changes are planed just run cellar-manager –help and you will see a list of all the planed features. This version also incorporates the newest winetricks script and the updates that have been made to it over the past couple months. and of course lots of tweaks and bug fixes.

If you’re a FreeBSD or PC-BSD user and need to run any of the software that we currently support on the Linux client you might be interested in helping beta test this build and future builds up to the final stable release. At this time we cant give away beta builds, but what we can do is if you decide to purchase a license from the store for FreeBSD (beta) or PC-BSD (beta) your support will last six months after the final build is released, so don’t worry you will get a full six months of upgrades and support on the final product. And by purchasing a pre release build you can submit your input and help support the development process. Users who buy the BSD (Beta) will have the option of downloading the tgz (sh file) or the .pbi file.